One cannot build life from refrigerators, politics, credit statements and crossword puzzles. That is impossible. Nor can one exist for any length of time without poetry, without color, without love.

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.

I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.

When someone blushes, doesn't that mean 'yes'?

You cannot plant an acorn in the morning, and expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of an oak.

I have always learned to distinguish the important from the urgent.

It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.